Middle East/North Africa Uprising 2011

Many are now expressing anxiety over the negotiations’ lack of transparency and the possibility that the Egyptian government could agree to onerous conditions that may force it to cut back on spending on social welfare and safety nets. “Many fear that a new era of dependency will start, even after the revolution,” Amr Adly, economic and social justice director with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a Cairo-based watchdog, told IPS.

“The best way for the international community to support a fresh start for the Egyptian people would be to support an independent commission to determine if much of the debt accrued during the Mubarak era is illegitimate and thus should be cancelled, before any new debt is undertaken,” Deborah James, with the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a think tank here in Washington, told IPS.

Morsi’s government is clearly aware of its lack of economic expertise, and thus has chosen to keep around some important members of Mubarak’s government, including the governor of the central bank, Farouk Al-Okdah, and others. “These are the very members of the neoliberal team once in charge under Mubarak,” Adly says. “These bureaucrats and technocrats are quite conservative, and there is the idea that they have been kept in office in order to negotiate with the IMF and the World Bank.”

Saddled with an estimated $35 billion of external debt, Egypt has been using much needed tax revenue to pay back international creditors.  Egypt recently put in a request for $4.8 billion to the IMF but with massive debt taken out under Hosni Mubarak, further debt on the Egyptian people may do more harm than good.

As the largest debtor nation in the region, instead of piling up more of a debt burden, the nation needs to make already unsustainable debts more manageable – and lending institutions should consider debt relief as a way to free up resources for the new Egypt.

The Egyptian people are being asked to pay back loans that were given to a tyrannical and unrepresentative former leader. While the international community was aware of the corruption, the suppression and the militaristic, strong man rule of law, loans continued to be given to Hosni Mubarak without the true consent of the people who would be shouldering the burden. It is unjust to demand that loans the people never asked for, never had any participation in accepting and rarely benefited from should now become the responsibility of Egypt's citizens. And the IMF piling on more debt will not help.

A local court froze the orders late last year. Al-Amur said the court ruled in favour of the villagers because it was clear the state hadn’t worked out where the 500 residents would move once their homes were destroyed. The Israeli government is currently appealing the decision. “They don’t know where exactly they want to move the people,” said al-Amur. “They don’t have a resettling plan, not just for Al-Sira but for all the Bedouin.”

All the Negev Bedouin — 180,000-190,000 people — are Israeli citizens. About half of them live in some 35 unrecognised villages like Al-Sira.

Ismail Abu Saad, a Bedouin academic and professor at Ben-Gurion University, who lives in the recognised town of Lakiya, says Israel’s policy of Bedouin urbanisation has created “third-world enclaves in the middle of an affluent society.

Most recently, the Saudi authorities arrested the Qatif-based cleric Nimr al-Nimr, shooting him in the leg and killing several people during the operation in the village of al-Awwamiyya.

In the Kingdom, to champion democracy is a mental illness.

Things are so bad in Bahrain that the UN Human Rights Council passed a declaration calling on King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to implement the recommendations of his own appointed Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry. Unsurprisingly, the United States, the United Kingdom and seven European Union states (including Sweden) sat silently and did not endorse the declaration.

‘We’ve heard so much negativity, but can you tell us what you are actually doing about it?’ The question came from the back of the hall at the Africa Centre in London, where over 100 people had gathered to hear about the state of contemporary African protest movements from a panel of African activists including Ayanda Kota of the South African Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, Bayo Oyenuga of Occupy Nigeria, Osama Zumam of the Sudanese Communist Party and the respected commentator and political activist Yash Tandon.

However, these events have rarely been articulated into an African narrative, with the result that western audiences end up being drip-fed stories reinforcing the impression of stereotypical African instability and ‘Afro-pessimism’. Yet if the under or mis-reported uprisings, protests, revolts and changes of regime in many parts of Africa over the past few years (including, amongst others Cote D'Ivoire, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Mozambique) have told us anything, it is that politics on the continent does not always, or mostly, take place at the point of a gun. 

Shrinking the state in Africa (an outcome of these policies as enforced by international donors) has produced the very conditions which protestors have revolted against: corruption, rising utility prices, and growing inequality.

“Citizens elect the government with a mandate to serve their interest and operate using public money,” Mendel told IPS. “So the idea that the government owns information is inconsistent with what a government is supposed to do.” The availing of information permits public engagement in the government process – everything from community planning to elections.

In May 2011, Tunisia became the second Arab country after Jordan to adopt freedom of information legislation, fulfilling a promise of its provisional government to end the media silence and unaccountability of the former regime.

After the uprising, however, the government sought loans from international donors to shore up the country’s battered economy. One of the conditions, sources say, was a tacit agreement to enact legislation that improves transparency.

The dictator’s downfall, however, gave union activists more room to operate. Workers have set up over 500 independent syndicates in recent months. The majority have affiliated with two autonomous labour bodies, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) led by Abu Eita, and the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress (EDLC) headed by former steel worker Kamal Abbas.

ETUF is proving to be a multi-headed hydra. The mammoth organisation was weakened by rulings that dissolved its executive board, put its leadership under investigation for corruption, and pulled the plug on 15 million dollars in annual government subsidies. Yet its core remains intact.

Many activists believe Egypt’s two main powers, the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, are trying to rebuild ETUF as a counterweight to newfound syndical liberties. They claim the generals – opposed to organised labour – have sought to contain worker movements by criminalising strikes and preserving Mubarak-era labour laws.

The above mentioned example does not mean that I am necessarily praising the politics of the TUC or the Labour Party. What I am trying to highlight is the existence of a machine or a structure that can mobilise the working class, articulate their demands, and claim their representation.

Despite the presence of leftists in the leadership board of the federation, the political discourse followed by the leadership has been one of economism, separating the economic from the political in propaganda and agitation, which in effect is only hindering the maturity of the labour movement in terms of articulating a political programme.

On the plus side, Egypt not only has the largest population in the Middle East, but is one of the Arab world's most diversified economies with oil and natural gas reserves, world-class tourist attractions and a strategic trading location between Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which explains why no major investors have left Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster. The new administration could improve Egypt's economic prospects should it prove to be less corrupt than Mubarak’s.

ENI, which has been operating in Egypt since 1954 through its subsidiary International Egyptian Oil Company (IEOC), owns a 56 per cent working interest in the Meleiha Concession, with Russia's Lukoil holding a 24 percent stake and Japan's Mitsui owning 20 percent. In Egypt's Western Desert ENI already produces about 36,000 bpd in five different development licenses.And, unlike Egypt’s eastern neighbour Saudi Arabia, which has been nervous about the implications of the Egyptian revolution, Qatar, which was always more enthusiastic about Egypt's political changes, is focusing more on private-sector investment there, most notably when earlier his month, Qatar Petroleum engaged in “serious” talks about investing in an Egyptian oil-refinery project.

In a way counterrevolution started already mid-March 2011 when Saudi and Emirati troops invaded Bahrain to put an end to the movement. Precisely at the same moment NATO forces struck Gaddafi. Cracking down on the uprising in Bahrain, while supporting Benghazi ?

It was an Arab movement in the sense that it happened from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian-Arabian Gulf, which constitutes a cultural and linguistic zone, even if the local dialects are different, a significant number of people have a mother tongue other than Arabic (Tamazight, Kurds…) or do not consider themselves Arabs. A region stretching out from its common destiny.

Through the policies of infitâh (economic opening) and the process of privatization, the coherence of the system built post independence has vanished. Neoliberalism has deepened the differences between rich and poor. For the oligarchies, privatization was the opportunity to plunder and control the benefits of oil and other raw materials but also to snaffle the grants of foreign aid. In each country the gap between oligarchy and society has widened. And rage has accumulated.

The apartment blocks on my street in downtown Cairo have accommodated many cycles of Egypt’s political tumult in the past 18 months. A stone’s throw from Tahrir Square, they have been enveloped in teargas, pockmarked by Molotov cocktails, pressed into use as urban barricades by both revolutionaries and pro-Mubarak militias and provided the backdrop for some of the post-Mubarak military generals’ most violent assaults on the citizens they swore to protect.

There are a million empirical holes that could be picked in this chronicle – the only results we have so far (from Egyptians voting abroad) put Moussa and Shafiq in fourth and fifth places respectively while the lazy insistence of characterising Aboul Fotouh as an unreconstructed Islamist (and hence automatically anti-Tahrir) bears little relation to the substance of his support on the ground.

Two misapprehensions underpin much of the discussion about the revolution.

Three years ago when Tajudeen Abdul Raheem died in Nairobi, I met one of his many Nairobi-based friends a week later. In jest, he said to me: “Awino, before you die be sure to leave a list of your friends’ names so that we call on them after you die”. It was a tongue in cheek statement but one that epitomized the reality of Taju’s life. He ‘belonged’ to many and even though most of us did not know him very well, his larger than life personality, a connection to his own struggles and an interest in his contributions to the Pan African movement made it seem as though you were comrades from another life time. He had a way of making you feel like you were old friends. You could not but take ownership of him. I am reminded of this conversation today because of the metaphorical similarities it bears with the events that occurred in Egypt and Tunisia specifically. At the height of the ‘Arab Spring’ many African and Pan African commentators were quick to counter the overwhelmingly western media narrative that positioned the uprisings as part of an Arab – Middle Eastern process, disconnected from the histories of democratisation in the rest of Africa. Some needed to take ‘ownership’ of the popular uprisings as Pan African in nature, as inspired by the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1990s in particular and shaped by the some of our liberation giants – Nkrumah, Cabral, Senghor, Sankara and Lumumba to name a few. In fact, the uprisings presented an opportunity to dismantle the North Africa – Sub Saharan Africa divide. Re-asserting the Pan African slant and situating the ideologies of the Fanons of this world offered an incredible opportunity – we hoped – to transform the uprising discourses and in turn those claimed by the youth in these countries.

Despite symbols of democracy such as a seemingly valid constitution, regular cosmetic elections in other parts of the continent, the democratic process was a journey which had effectively been reclaimed by the masses and not left to the political elite.

I must underscore that what I speak about here is not the instrumental debate of whether Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans consider themselves African. By virtue of geography and history they are African without a doubt. In fact, one of the most popular refrains today is the fact that Tunisia gave Africa its name. The more important question for me is whether being African is simply a process of naming or whether it is connected to belonging? If becoming African entails a much a more complex process that is not simply limited to a shared history of colonial oppression, then what do we need to do to differently as those interested in a Pan African agenda beyond invoking semantics?

To some, the economic gloom might seem to be lifting in Egypt, but they must remember that this "brighter" prospect is mainly due to the $3.2 billion loan the government expects to sign shortly with the International Monetary Fund in the hopes that this will clear the way for other foreign aid. However, foreign aid can only solve immediate and not long-term economic problems and no foreign-aid-dependent country is likely to become prosperous.